House Speaker John Boehner just wanted to sneak out of the White House for a smoke.

But President Barack Obama pulled him aside for a grilling. Obama wanted to know why they were in the second day of a government shutdown that the speaker had repeatedly and publicly pledged to avoid.

“John, what happened?” Obama asked, according to people briefed on the Oct. 2 conversation.

“I got overrun, that’s what happened,” Boehner said.

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A particular low point came Oct. 1 when Democrats released private emails to POLITICO aimed at making Boehner look like a hypocrite. The emails showed that Boehner had actually been deeply engaged in fixing an Obamacare glitch that would have cost lawmakers and their staff thousands of extra dollars. Hill veterans weren’t quite as shocked by the flip-flop as the utter breakdown of decorum between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Boehner.

Above all, Republicans never believed Obama would hold firm on his refusal to negotiate and Democrats would maintain an unusual level of cohesion — united by a visceral desire to put the tea party in its place and an almost mama grizzly instinct to protect Obamacare.

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Republicans cycled through every option possible during the three-week standoff to save face. Their Obamacare demands devolved from repeal and defund to a delay of the individual mandate. They revived the idea of a “grand bargain” on taxes and government spending but Reid openly laughed when Boehner raised it during a White House meeting. They offered a more narrow proposal to replace the sequester cuts for two years. Then, they went back to Obamacare.

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When things were at their worst, some Republican senators urged Vice President Joe Biden to get more involved. But he told each of them it wasn’t his call. Biden participated in meetings at the White House but Reid, still angry about the vice president’s concessions during the fiscal cliff talks last December, had shut him out of direct negotiations with lawmakers this time around.

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Any hope of an easy debt limit extension was dashed in late August when Boehner promised a “whale of a fight.”

Obama and Reid got on the same page early on, agreeing during strategy sessions over the summer that they wouldn’t give up anything until Republicans renewed the debt limit and government funding.

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Reid nixed an idea in mid-September to invite the congressional leaders over to the White House for a talk. It sends the wrong message, Reid argued to Obama in a call. We shouldn’t even create the appearance of a negotiation, Reid said.

The meeting never happened.

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In the run-up to the shutdown, Obama was weak politically; his Syria strategy was panned by both parties; Obamacare was suffering poor poll numbers; and Republicans thought they had him on the ropes.

Yet Cruz’s anti-Obamacare drive played right into Democratic hands.

“The president gets up every day and reads the newspaper and thanks God that Ted Cruz is in the United States Senate,” a Republican senator pointedly told Cruz at a closed-door meeting.

Even amiable and soft-spoken Republicans like John Boozman of Arkansas tore apart Cruz in a private GOP meeting, saying he was making GOP senators seem like they were for Obamacare when they had fought so hard to torpedo it. Boozman pointedly told Cruz he hadn’t been bullied since middle school, and he wouldn’t be bullied now.

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Shortly after the White House meeting Oct. 2, a ragged Boehner filled in his closest allies about his talk with Obama, telling them that the president had confronted him in the room that former President George W. Bush called the “Lewinsky suite.”

Over in the Senate, tensions were running high among Republicans.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) teed off on Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), lambasting him for what she considered a failed strategy with no way out. Cruz arrived late, but Ayotte wanted Cruz to hear this, too. She repeated her remarks, this time directing them at Cruz, too.

“He is so incredibly immature,” sniffed one GOP senator who attended the lunch.

The lashing humbled Cruz, who began to take a quieter role in the intervening days. But he continued to push forward on strategy that Republicans had essentially left for dead.

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Sitting around a conference table in the Roosevelt Room, Obama hammered the Republicans about reopening the government, demanding repeatedly to know “what is it going to take” to get it done. A frustrated Ryan finally stood up and urged them to come together and craft something lasting.

But what senior administration officials aides heard was a Freudian slip. “We’re going to have six weeks to negotiate the debt limit,” Ryan said.

Nobody challenged him, but White House aides mentally filed it away.

By this point, McConnell knew things were going awry with the GOP strategy in the House. So he began fielding suggestions from GOP senators like Rob Portman and Susan Collins, Ayotte and Lisa Murkowski who were working on various proposals that could potentially win Democratic support.

“I certainly was encouraging to all the entrepreneurial activity that was going on with our members and to talk to the Democratic side with the hopes that we can come with a better outcome,” McConnell said.

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By Monday evening, it appeared that Reid and McConnell had a deal.

But Boehner wanted one last shot. He told McConnell Monday to hold off any agreement with Reid. McConnell, who faces his own reelection battle in 2014, complied.

Boehner then tried twice Tuesday to rally his conference around proposals that would eke out some sliver of a win after a 15-day government shutdown. His last-ditch play was to reopen the government until Dec. 15 and raise the debt ceiling until Feb. 7. He tried to attach a number of conservative policies, but no combination would’ve passed.

Less than 12 hours later, Boehner declared the proposal dead, paving the way for the final Reid-McConnell solution.

“I like him, he’s a nice person,” Pelosi told POLITICO on Thursday, the day after the shutdown ended.

But Pelosi still seemed stunned that Boehner allowed the shutdown to occur as long as it did, when she repeatedly offered him Democratic support to help pass a bill to reopen the government.

Good God stop with the debt ceiling crises! The Australian dollar is back up to pretty much parity with the US, which is really bad for our exports! And the Tourism industry. Please, won't somebody think of the tourists?

The single-most damaging thing that has happened to Republicans for 2014 is all of the Senate Republicans coming out, attacking the House Republicans, attacking those pushing the effort to defund Obamacare and lining themselves up opposite of the American people

Crap, that reminds me that it's almost tourist season 'round my neck of the woods.

I thought it starts to get cold in New York around now? Or do people visit in winter because all the hobos have frozen to death and they won't bother you?

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Theophany wrote:YOU'RE AN ELITIST @#%^ AETHIEN, NO WONDER YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS AND PEOPLE HATE YOU. someproteinguy wrote:Aethien you take more terrible pictures than a Japanese tourist. Astarin wrote:One day, Maz, you'll learn not to click on anything Aeth links.

Theophany wrote:YOU'RE AN ELITIST @#%^ AETHIEN, NO WONDER YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS AND PEOPLE HATE YOU. someproteinguy wrote:Aethien you take more terrible pictures than a Japanese tourist. Astarin wrote:One day, Maz, you'll learn not to click on anything Aeth links.

Christmas season in New York is quite the spectacle. And you can keep warm enough walking over the subway grates.

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publiusvarus wrote:

we all know liberals are well adjusted american citizens who only want what's best for society. While conservatives are evil money grubbing scum who only want to sh*t on the little man and rob the world of its resources.

Between the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Christmas Tree lighting, and New Years, it gets a bit hectic with a flock of Michiganese fleeing the subways in abject terror after seeing a little rat.

It's the rats that fall out of the sky and knock over lamp-posts onto peoples' heads that give the worst reputation.

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publiusvarus wrote:

we all know liberals are well adjusted american citizens who only want what's best for society. While conservatives are evil money grubbing scum who only want to sh*t on the little man and rob the world of its resources.